Chris Bertram

The term “white privilege” has been getting a lot of play and a lot of pushback recently, for example, from Kenan Malik in this piece and there are some parallels in the writing of people like Adolph Reed who want to stress class-based solidarity over race. Often it isn’t clear what the basic objection from “class” leftists to the concept of “white privilege” is. Sometimes the objection seems to be a factual one: that no such thing exists or that insofar as there is something, then it is completely captured by claims about racism, so that the term “white privilege” is redundant. Alternatively, the objection is occasionally strategic or pragmatic: the fight for social justice requires an alliance that crosses racial and other identity boundaries and terms like “white privilege” sow division and make that struggle more difficult. These objections are, though, logically independent of one another: “white privilege” could be real, but invoking it could be damaging to the struggle; or it could be pragmatically useful for justice even if somewhat nebulous and explanatorily empty.

One particular type of argument is to deny that some white people enjoy privilege on the basis of noticing that some groups of white people suffer outcomes that are as bad or worse than non-white people on average or some non-white groups in particular. The claim is then that it is nonsensical to think of these white people as enjoying “white privilege”, or, indeed, any kind of privilege at all. But whatever the truth turns out to be about the explanatory usefulness of “white privilege”, I think these outcome-oriented assessments, sometimes based on slicing and dicing within racial or ethnic groups in ways that create artificial entities out of assemblages of demographic characteristics (white+rural+poor, for example), don’t ground a valid objection because they misconstrue what the privilege claim is about.
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“Cancel culture” has recently been in the news as a threat to free speech and open debate, most notably with the publication the other week of that open letter in Harpers. Cancelling is essentially a kind of crowdsourced attempt to boycott and ostracise individuals for their words or actions, sometimes including calls for them they be fired from their jobs or denied contracts and opportunities by media organisations. In the democratic space of social media this can sometimes tip over into unpleasant mobbing and sometimes bullying. But is “cancelling” people always wrong? Is the practice always an attack on the norms of free speech and open debate? Might cancelling some people be necessary to ensure others get the voice and platform to which they are entitled?

One objection to “cancellation” is that it chills open debate and makes people self-censor. But the problem with this critique is that some speech should be chilled and sometimes people ought to self-censor. A society that refuses to tolerate speech like David Starkey’s recent racist remarks about “damn blacks” and the slave trade is better for it, and it is a pity that Starkey didn’t think twice before uttering them. Now that he has come out with such language, he’s been cancelled, and rightly so.
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Just finished Johny Pitts’s Afropean: Notes from a Black Europe (Penguin). It is a remarkable and highly readable book which I strongly recommend. Pitts, a journalist and photographer from Sheffield in England, embarks on a journey across Europe to discover the continent’s African communities, from Sheffield itself, through Paris, the Netherlands, Berlin, Sweden, Russia, Rome, Marseille and Lisbon. Pitts, the son of an African-American soul singer and a working-class Englishwoman, is a curious insider-outsider narrator of the book which ambles from meditations on black history and (often American) literary forbears to chance encounters with black and brown Europeans in hostels, trains, stations, cafés and universities.

Is there a unity in all this? Hard to say, since as Pitts observes, these different populations, linked by an experience of marginalisation, come to be where they are via very diverse personal and collective histories. Some have come in their best clothes from former colonies to nations they were taught about as the motherland, only to find they had to make their lives in a place that was disappointing or hostile and where the white population — British, French, or Dutch — remain ill-disposed to see their new compatriots as being part of themselves. Others have fled war, persecution and trauma in Sudan or South Africa, only to find themselves exiled on the periphery of Scandiavian social democracy. And then there are the residual African students in a Russia transformed in thirty years from somewhere professing — occastionally sincerely — the unity and equality of all humankind, into a place where it is dangerous for black people to venture out at night for fear of violent attack or worse.

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This character was very relaxed

Yesterday, one of those reports was released purporting to reveal some things about British political attitudes. The take-home was that the public were closer to Labour than the Tories on the economic dimension but that things were reversed when it came to social attitudes, with voters being more authoritarian and traditional than their representatives and more closely aligned with the Tories. This, coupled with the claim that the social values dimension is gaining in importance compared to the economic one, looms large in some “political science” explanations of Brexit and Tory success.

Looking at the report, I noticed an odd thing: one of the questions was about “traditional British values” and whether respondents thought young people should respect them more. I imagined, naively that there must be a list somewhere of what these values are, given that they are purportedly what voters have opinions about. But no. Respondents are expected to interpret the question for themselves, so if a person thinks Britain is traditionally open and tolerant and thinks this has gone into reverse in recent years and says “yes”, their response will nevertheless count as a score for authoritarianism. I don’t know how likely my hypothetical case is, but it is at least possible, particularly, perhaps, from a disappointed immigrant who had been sold on a particular image of Britain.

There is, by the way, an official list of British values. It occurs in the case of the British goverment’s “Prevent” strategy, which is supposed to combat extremism. According to that policy, the British values are “democracy”, “the rule of law”, “individual liberty and mutual respect”, and “Tolerance of different faith and beliefs”. If you run an educational establishment, you have specific duties to encourage these. (A nursery for under-5s I’m acquainted with had a little official explainer on the wall, telling its charges that the “rule of law” is about “following the rules”.) I suppose, hypothetically, that a respondent with these values in mind, and thinking of the Brexiteer and Johnson record on them – plans for voter suppression, illegal prorogation of Parliament, frequent abuse of executive power in immigration, racist and Islamophobic diatribes by the man at the top – might regret their demise and say “yes” but be coded as “authoritarian”. Perhaps not so likely, I admit.
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One of the most important books I’ve read over the past couple of years is Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent and Reform. One of the passages that struck me most forcefully at the time is where he discusses the value of self-respect in the face of oppression. “Those with self-respect,” he writes, “live their lives in a way that conveys their conviction that they are proper objects of respect. For example, they resist the efforts of others to mistreat them and openly resent unfair treatment.” (98)

He has a brief, but powerful discussion of this value in and the need to resist if it is to be affirmed:

Oppression can erode a person’s sense of self-respect, causing one to doubt one’s claim to equal moral status. We can understand an attack on one’s self-respect as an action, policy, or practice that threatens to make one feel that one is morally inferior, that one does not deserve the same treatment as others. To maintain a healthy sense of self-respect under conditions of injustice, the oppressed may therefore fight back against their oppressors, demanding the justice they know they deserve, even when the available evidence suggests that justice is not on the horizon. They thereby affirm their moral worth and equal status.

…. Persons with a strong sense of self-respect sometimes refuse to co-operate with the demands of an unjust society. They stand up for themselves, are defiant in the fact of illegitimate authority, refuse to comply with unjust social requirements, protest maltreatment and humiliation, and so on, even when they know that such actions will not bring about justice or reduce theor suffering. Self-respect, then, can be a matter of living with a sense of moral pride despite unjust conditions. (99-100)

This seems absolutely right to me. Resistance may turn out to be futile in the sense that it brings about no lasting change or improvement in conditions, though we hope that it will. Often, as Shelby says a few lines later on, discretion is the better part of valour, both morally and prudentially. But sometimes people just have to stand up to affirm their status as human beings. And when they do the rest of us have to stand with them, and we deny their value, and demean our own if we turn our backs. This is why the many acts of resistance and protest by black Americans and those standing with them are so deeply moving and significant, however this ends.

This character has been ruling over the local allotments recently. Bold, but very quiet, and you don’t see it coming until you do. Looks to be in good condition.

One thing I’ve found a bit more time to do under lockdown is to listen to more music, and on the back of reading Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, I’ve been listening to different recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations every day. Very calming and sometimes transporting. The trouble is, though, that as someone who likes music, who has read quite a bit about it, who goes to the occasional concert, I am also somewhat unmusical. My attempts in middle-age to learn the piano were not crowned with success and my elderly teacher was really quite vocal in his denunciations of my incompetence. (A welcome side-effect though was that my children have managed to become musicians.) So how, among the bewildering variety of performances on different instruments – all of which are available at the click of a mouse – to pick what is “good” to listen to? How far do you trust the experts and their recommendations? And what if you find yourself liking things that the musically competent condemn and disliking things that they praise as exsquisite. Such are the anxieties of the aesthetic inadequate faced with art and the judgement of the acknowledged cognoscenti.

So what have my listenings prompted so far by way of inexpert conclusions? First, that I am pretty allergic to the sound of the harpsichord — something I knew already — though I accept that you sometimes hear things in the music that you don’t when listening to a piano performace. Second, that neither of the celebrated performances by Glenn Gould really do it for me: the first sounds too dry, in the second I find the humming too distracting. Third, that there is an extraordinary degree of variation in the playing, such that it can seem like different pieces of music are being performed (most obviously in something like Wilhelm Kempff’s ornamentless performance of the Aria as contrasted with most others). Finally, that it turned out to be really important to me how a particular variation (XIII) is performed. Some of the renditions are extraordinarily soulful and affecting and some seem like technical exercises that lack such meaning. For what its worth, I’ve most enjoyed performances by Tatiana Nicolaeva (a concert in Stockholm), by Murray Perahia, and by Maria Tipo. I have on LP or CD the 1955 Gould, a Rosalyn Tureck and the Charles Rosen, but I haven’t revisited the last two yet. What do Crooked Timber readers suggest?

Despite the UK now having the highest death toll from COVID-19 in Europe and the second-highest in the world after the United States, the right-wingers of the Telegraph and the Spectator, abetted by the erstwhile Marxists of Spiked! and similar persist in denouncing lockdown as a tyrannical assault on freedom. It is clear that compulsory social distancing measures do indeed reduce people’s negative liberty by constraining the set of actions they can legally perform. Most people, however, view this as a sensible price to reduce the threat COVID-19 presents to each of us and to others, particularly the most vulneralble, the elderly, health workers, transport workers etc. After all, if you are dead then your freedom is worth nothing.

As students of freedom know, however, there is more than one way of understanding the concept. Libertarians who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and freedom-limiting. In particular, they either fail to notice or deny that the workplace is coercive. After all, the people who work for the person to whom they are now subordinate freely contracted into that position, didn’t they? I don’t think I need to repeat the familiar points about choices, options, and structural oppression here.

Instead I invite you to consider what will happen if and when lockdown is lifted. Jerry Cohen made the point in his essay “Are Disadvantaged Workers Who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous Jobs?” that you can’t force someone to do what they are unfree to do. If workers are unfree to contract for less than the minimum wage or to work in unsafe conditions they bosses can’t (legally) force them to do those things. The same, rather obviously, goes for lockdown. People who are more-or-less confined to their homes can’t easily be forced to work in workplaces that expose them to the threat of COVID-19. (I know that even under lockdown many workers, such as health workers and bus drivers are effectively so forced, and COVID has rather powerfully exposed some of the divides that exist among different groups of workers.)
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